Adobe Photoshop iPad apps arrive

Adobe's Photoshop companion apps for Apple's iPad are now available in the App Store. The three apps, Color Lava, Eazel and Nav, were first announced last month and follow an update for Adobe Photoshop CS5, which is required in order to use the companion apps. The apps work with Photoshop for PCs and Macs.

The Adobe Nav app is the least expensive of the lot at $1.99 and allows you to access Photoshop tools and browse your open documents. You can select your preferred apps from the Photoshop toolbar and use the iPad to select whichever tool you need. Adobe Nav also allows you to preview Photoshop documents and create new documents from within the app, as well as closing files (which closes them in Photoshop too).

Adobe Eazel , $4.99, is basically a finger-painting app with a few interesting features. There is no immediate user interface; you need to place five fingers on the iPad, which will bring up menus to change the color, opacity, or brush size. A cool feature is brush realism: The paint is 'wet' when you first apply it (it dries in a few seconds), so if you cross it with another stroke, it will blend (blending value is dependent on the size of the brush). As part of the integration with Photoshop on your computer, Eazel can send the final art to Photoshop, complete with all layers for fine-tuning.

The third Photoshop companion app is Color Lava , $2.99. The app allows you to use your fingertips to mix colors on the iPad and create unique swatches, which can be imported into Photoshop later. You can also create and organize various color themes to use in your Photoshop project.

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